Hi 👋

Thanks for being here, it really does mean a lot.

I’ll share more about my background properly at some point, but this felt like a good place to start. I’ve always wanted to build something of my own, not in a dramatic quit-everything kind of way because I still had bills to pay.

So I started Tenth Muse alongside a full-time job and eventually, a baby. It was never the perfect time and I didn’t have loads of space for it, but I started anyway, fitting it into evenings, weekends, and whatever small pockets of time I could find. By our second year, we hit six figures.

What stands out to me now is how that actually happened. I didn’t have much time, and that changes everything. You don’t overcomplicate things or try everything. You can’t build big messy systems that need constant attention, so you just make things work.

There’s the version of building a business that looks good from the outside, and then there’s the version that actually holds up. For me, it meant keeping things simple, probably too simple at times, figuring things out as I went, and setting things up properly early because I didn’t have time to fix them later. It was less about scaling fast and more about making something that genuinely worked.

I don’t see this side talked about much, building something when your life is already full and you can’t just throw more time at it. Things need to be simple enough to run on a normal day.

That’s what I care about now and why I started this newsletter, to share how to take an idea and make it real without it taking over everything else.

Anyway, this is just the start. I’ll share more as I go, not perfectly, just honestly.

Sophie